Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Cool things to do with chrome

Apart from being an excellent browser for web developers, Google Chrome is also a pretty awesome browser for everyone else. I've collected a few of the cool things you can do with Chrome.

1. Incognito Window

If you ever need to log in to the same service with two different accounts (say, if you're on your wife's computer and both want to check your gmail), open a 'New Incognito Window' (Shift+⌘+N/Ctrll+Shift+N). Cookies and history entries will not affect other windows.

2. Undo a closed tab

Yes, that's right, simply press Shift+⌘+T / Ctrl+Shift+T and the tab you just closed is opened again! AND - you can press it several times!

3. Pinned tabs

Using the same web sites all the time? Wouldn't it be nice if they where always on the same tab so you could use keyboard shortcuts to access them with ⌘+n / Ctrl+n (n is the tab number you wish to jump to)?

Right click on the tab and select "Pin tab" and you have it! In addition, the tab size get's shrunk to just displaying the webpage's icon, and it's automatically moved as the first tab. Next time you (re)start Chrome, it's still there!

4. Synced chrome

Using chrome on several computers? Setup syncing through your Google account, and your bookmarks and settings is automatically synced across machines. Go to chrome://settings/personal (or preferences > personal) to set it up.

5. Which tab is making the sound

Ever had several tabs opened and suddenly one (or more) of them started playing audio? And you couldn't find which one? Then MuteTab might be just the thing for you!

6. Customized search engines - with shortcuts

If you use a custom search engine/dictionary/encyclopedia often, you might want to consider adding it as a custom search engine with a shortcut.
Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines and fill in the three inputs.
Use %s for the query part of the URL:

Anything you put in the Keywordinput will become the shortcut, so in this example, if you type g+ in the location bar you'll be able to search directly (the shortcut for the location bar is ⌘-L or Ctrl-L.

7. Developer omnibox

If you're a developer, you certainly don't want to miss the Developer Omniboxes. They allow you to search through API reference documentation for a variety of languages and libraries.

Go to chrome://flags/ and enable Tab Overview. You can now use the three-finger-down-swipe or Ctrl+⌘+T shortcut to have a nice thumbnail view of all open tabs.

Make sure to check out the other stuff there as well, but read the warning first.

10. Isolated chrome
If you want to have an isolated chrome environment of the same release, you can do this by issuing a different --user-data-dir on startup. This article also explains how to neatly make a convinent shortcut to the different directories you want to create.